


His Best Unbeaten Brother

by severinne



Series: And Never Go To Sleep [2]
Category: Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Insanity, M/M, Mindfuck, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-09
Updated: 2009-02-09
Packaged: 2017-10-15 04:42:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/157144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/severinne/pseuds/severinne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam and Gene steal a quiet moment in the wake of Reg Cole’s arrest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Best Unbeaten Brother

**Author's Note:**

  * For [candesgirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/candesgirl/gifts).



> This cut-scene from 'And Never Go To Sleep' is set between the first and second chapters of the original fic, and follows from the events of episode 1.06.

  
‘Shit.’ Suddenly determined and bloody furious with himself, Gene turned away from Ray and stormed back into the now-abandoned Gazette offices. He didn’t want to go back inside, not with his suit soaked through with scotch (having a drinking problem was one matter; smelling like one quite another entirely), not with his heart still stuttering its uneven, anxious beats heavy in his chest. Not with the scene of Sam’s near-execution still playing itself over and over in his distracted mind.

So distracted that he had forgotten to retrieve his gun.

Gene entered the building with a swift kick to the door, sweating and seething. With luck, his gun was still sitting on the ledge outside the window where Cole had discarded it – he was pretty sure he had heard it clatter on concrete as close as that, he didn’t want to think of his gun dropping into the parking lot, undiscovered or even –

‘Was just looking for you.’

He faltered on the stairs, frozen by Sam’s voice echoing down from the landing above him. For a too-long and far too weak moment, Gene raked his body with his eyes, suffused by a rush of relief, of gratitude. His Sam was alive.

Sam was also starting to frown at his prolonged lack of response, so Gene promptly cleared his throat and continued up the right-hand turning of the stairs. ‘Oh, aye?’

‘Yeah.’ Sam cocked his hip against the railing, eyebrows raised as he watched Gene ascend up to him. ‘Your gun?’

He held it out. Gene stared, his mouth suddenly dry.

‘Don’t know how forensics missed it.’ A disgruntled note darkened Sam’s voice even as he deftly flipped the revolver in his hand, offering the handgrip to Gene. ‘Then again, I’d completely forgotten myself, was already clearing the room when it suddenly occurred to me… Gene?’

With a frustrated shake of his head, Gene snatched his gun out of Sam’s hand. Its weight felt large and clumsy in his hand. ‘Ta.’

Silence dropped sudden and awkward over them both. Gene let the gun dangled uselessly at his side while he continued to drink Sam in with his eyes. The short, mousy hair that never had the chance to grow long enough for a trim, the permanent furrow between his brows, the soft pink of his mouth twisting into a haunted grimace.

Gene flinched, unprepared for the fingers sliding beneath his open coat, prodding at the singed and sodden hole in his suit jacket. Without the familiar flask in place – he’d already thrown it out, no sense keeping a leaky vessel – Sam’s fingertips pressed close to his chest. He could already feel a bruise spreading beneath his shirt where a bullet wound should have been.

‘Thought I’d lost you.’ Sam spoke in a hard-edged hush that didn’t quite disguise the choked-off emotion in his voice.

Uncomfortably, Gene shifted his gaze to the side, over the railing. He couldn’t find that sense of his own near-death that Sam seemed to be feeling so sharply. He had never felt any danger as real as that, only the panic and the rage and the need to preserve Sam’s life, fragile thing that it was. He wanted to throw Sam’s worrisome pouting back in his face, to yell at him to see some sodding sense, to stop parking himself at the receiving end of some bastard’s gun – three times now, _three_ and it wasn’t getting easier. Compared to that, Gene felt bloody invincible.

Then again… Gene’s frown deepened, aware once more of the heady scent of scotch wafting off his clothes. If he had died, what would have become of his Sam, if his Sam was nothing but… He promptly stuffed the question back down into the dark, maddening pit in the back of his mind.

Meanwhile, Sam’s fingers and mouth kept moving. ‘Y’know, when we were in that stationary cupboard, waiting for Cole to… I kept thinking…’

‘Typical,’ Gene snorted, and that got him a smile, but it faded quickly back to Sam’s familiar, anxious frown.

‘Kept thinking about how we’d never gotten around to…’ A faint blush trailed up Sam’s neck to his ears. ‘And I kept wishing Annie hadn’t been in there at all, ‘cos if we were gonna die, I wanted–‘

Sam cut himself off, snatched his hand away from Gene’s chest as though flames had suddenly licked at his fingertips. His entire body seemed to withdraw shamefully into itself.

‘Wanted what?’ Gene suspected he knew, but his lurid imaginings of what could have been in that dark and narrow room rapidly turned themselves over into what _had_ been, and the memory made Gene’s blood run cold.

‘Tell me what you wanted, Sam…’ Gene took a measured step forward, closing the brief distance Sam had tried to space between them. Sam avoided his gaze, eyes flickering as anxiously as they had in the stationary cupboard, when he had fumbled to find a happy memory out of a confusion of confessions that Gene knew he could never take for truth.

Gene’s happiest moment was the day he made DCI. The bracing swell of triumph in his heart throbbed there still, the pride in Harry’s eyes as clear in his mind as any photograph.

The drunken, bellowing sing-song of the team that was now his own.

For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow… oh, god.

Gene shuddered, unsettled by the ease with which Sam had somehow plucked Gene’s past from his head, made it his own.

‘I wanted…’ Sam’s whisky eyes crept upward. ‘I mean, I know you wanted to wait, but if it had been our only chance…’ He winced, self-consciously, and stared at the ceiling. ‘Look, just… forget it, yeah?’

‘No.’ Gene stared down into the narrow divide between their bodies, watched his right hand move, his gun still heavy against his palm. ‘No, maybe I don’t want to forget…’

The long barrel grazed a steady line up Sam’s inner thigh. Gene narrowed his eyes, watched avidly as Sam’s trousers tightened as the gun eased closer to his stirring erection. He heard Sam’s breath hitch, caught the premature twitch of his hips, and felt his own nerves twist feral and sharp within his own body.

Unrelenting steel dragged over the shape of Sam’s cock tenting his trousers, brushing slowly alongside. ‘How far would you have let me go?’ Gene asked. His voice seemed to come from somewhere both hot and cold, averaging out his words to a quiet rasp. ‘If it had been just you and me in there… what would we have done?’

‘Gene…’ Sam was all heat, eyes wide and dark.

‘What would you have let me do with you?’ His other hand lifted, cradled the column of Sam’s neck.

‘Anything…’ His eyes were fierce, fearless, full of trust. ‘Everything.’

Pulsing blood pounded into his palm; Gene’s thumb nested perfectly in the hollow at the base of Sam’s throat.

 _You’re breathing, your heart’s beating…_

Sam’s hips arched feverishly against Gene’s gun; Gene growled softly, shoved the heavy barrel harder between Sam’s legs.

 _…but it’s an illusion of life._

Shoved Sam’s body against the railing at his back. He was trembling now. Gene pressed tight to the sensation, fingers tightening at the nape of his neck…

‘Yes…’ Sam gasped. Breathlessly.

 _…it’s an illusion of life._

Panic snapped into Gene’s body like a gunshot. He jumped backward, heart racing, head rising from a haze he didn’t recognize. Flustered, uncertain, he dragged the back of his hand over his brow, found the movement slowed by the weight of his gun. His gun. Jesus.

‘Gene?’ Sam still sounded short of breath, still clung to the railing looking utterly debauched despite his perfectly intact clothing. Stifling another flare of desperate lust, Gene turned away and tucked his gun safely behind his belt.

‘Not here,’ he muttered. ‘C’mon.’

A strong, steady hand stopped him before he could retreat back down the stairs. ‘Tonight, then,’ Sam replied, low but urgent. ‘We can go back to my place…’

‘Team needs us tonight, Sam.’ And that wasn’t a lie, not really.

‘Gene.’ The hand wasn’t letting him go. ‘Look at me.’

Though it seemed entirely too risky, Gene couldn’t refuse. He turned back around and felt his breath catch in his throat. Sam’s face was far too open, his lips far too pink. Gene’s fists clenched in his coat pockets.

‘I didn’t mean to push you like that,’ Gene’s eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to retort but Sam kept going, ‘I know you’re not ready for that yet, and that’s fine, and I’m sorry but today was just too much and I wasn’t thinking straight and I shouldn’t have said anything but I’d still like to spend the night with you, and we don’t have to do anything but I–’

Gene cut him off with a kiss. Unintentionally, but Sam relaxed against him and Gene realized that he had been waiting for the chance to do this all through press statements and forensics and the rest of the blur that had come in the wake of Cole’s arrest. Relief flooded him, and Gene let himself linger over Sam’s taste and touch before drawing carefully back again.

‘Pub,’ he said, mouth still close to Sam’s. ‘Then back to your shit-hole of a flat. Deal?’

Sam grinned. ‘Got a bottle of scotch with your name on it,’ he promised, eyes sparking happily.

Gene stuffed down another stab of anxiety. ‘Smashing.’ He allowed his hand one last fleeting touch to Sam’s wrist before they went down together.


End file.
